Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  Karin Aparo later said that they had gone to sleep almost immediately, had talked not at all.

  Dennis was up a little after six and off for his job at the Tallwoods Country Club before seven. Karin, he said, was still asleep when he left the house.

  Karin later said that she was up with Dennis, that they had a brief conversation then, that he gave her the keys to his Triumph Spitfire sports car, telling her that she could use it that day and that he would be back after two.

  By seven-fifteen Karin had begun making telephone calls. Both Dennis Coleman, Sr., and his wife, Carol, had already left for their own jobs. Only Dennis’s younger brother, Matt, was still in the house.

  She called her best friend, Shannon Dubois, a girl her own age whom she had known since third grade, a classmate at Glastonbury High School, a tall, pretty girl with short blondish hair who looks like everybody’s idea of the girl next door. It was then seven-fifteen in the morning.

  Shannon remembers that Karin’s voice on the phone was nervous and upset when she said hello. Shannon asked, “What’s the matter? What’s worrying you?”

  Karin said, “My mother was found murdered last night. I need you. I’m at Dennis’s. Can you come over right away?”

  Shannon said that of course, she would, but somebody would have to pick her up.

  Karin said she’d ask Dennis’s brother, Matt, whom Shannon had been dating, to drive over and get her. When Shannon told her parents what had happened, they told her that if Karin wanted, she could stay with them until other arrangements had been made.

  Next, Karin phoned Archbishop Whealon, at his private number. She had known and been extremely close to him all her life; he had a very special relationship with her and with the Aparo family. She reached him, told him her mother had been murdered and asked if he would conduct the service at the funeral. It was a strange request, for Joyce Aparo was a divorced woman, had almost never attended church, was at odds with the church and had attempted to prevent Karin from practicing her religion. And presiding over funerals was a thing the archbishop no longer did. The last funeral he had conducted was for the late governor of Connecticut, Ella Grasso, in 1981. Nevertheless, Archbishop Whealon agreed to preside at the burial of Joyce Aparo and to do whatever he could to help Karin.

  She made two more calls then. One was to Michael Zaccaro, telling him she was at the Colemans’ and asking him to drive over because she needed his help. He agreed. The other was to Alex Markov, in Rowayton, to tell him what had happened.

  When Shannon arrived at the Coleman house a little later, Karin was waiting for her on the lawn outside. About a hundred yards in front of them they could see the Connecticut River sparkling in the summer morning sunlight, and behind the house stretched a large tract of deep, dense woods. Matt went into the house and up to his room. Karin and Shannon stood outside on the lawn and talked. “I said I couldn’t imagine who would have done such a thing,” Shannon remembers. “Then I asked her where Alex had been when it happened.”

  Karin said, “He was with me in Rowayton.”

  Shannon said, “Who could have done it?”

  Karin didn’t answer immediately. “She was standing there looking down at the ground, and I had this sudden feeling that she knew who had done it,” Shannon says. Karin looked up at the Coleman house. Shannon said, “Do you know?”

  Karin said, “Yes, I know. It was Dennis.”

  According to Shannon, she stared at Karin with disbelief and asked how Dennis had done it. Karin told her that Dennis had strangled her mother with a pair of nylons. “I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her.”

  But Karin offered proof. She led Shannon into the house and upstairs to Dennis’s room, opened the closet and pulled out a light-colored duffel bag. Karin opened the bag. Shannon looked inside. She saw what looked to her like black clothes and a black ski mask. And then Karin reached inside and pulled out a bright orange leather purse. Shannon recognized it. “I had seen Mrs. Aparo holding it. I was shocked, and then I saw a wallet inside and I pulled it out, and sure enough, Mrs. Aparo’s identification was inside it.”

  Shannon turned and walked out of the room. Karin put everything back into the duffel bag, put the bag back into the closet, and then she and Shannon went back downstairs and out to the lawn. They stood there waiting for Alex Markov to arrive, and while they waited, they talked more, about the murder and about the past.

  A car pulled up outside the house. Alex Markov and a friend name Yura got out and walked up to them. Karin greeted them, and immediately she and Markov went into the house and up to Dennis’s room, leaving Shannon and Yura alone on the lawn. After a while Markov and Karin reappeared. In one hand Markov was carrying an envelope. Shannon had seen folders like it before; they usually contained musical scores. Markov and his friend went back to their car and drove off; Markov had told them he had to leave because he had to prepare for a concert.

  When they were gone, Karin told Shannon that she and Markov had been talking about their future. If things worked out as they hoped, the twenty-four-year-old Markov would become sixteen-year-old Karin Aparo’s guardian. Karin wanted them to live together in the Aparo condominium: Markov wanted Karin to live with him in Rowayton.

  Alone again, Karin and Shannon discussed what they would do now. “We talked about how we would have to be quiet about the whole thing.” It was, Shannon remembers, something they both agreed was a necessity.

  About eleven-thirty Michael Zaccaro arrived. With him were two of his Athena partners, Roland Butler and Ann Marie Murray. They went into the house, and Shannon began to prepare lunch for them. While they waited, Karin and Ann Marie Murray went out for a walk. For about a half hour they roamed through the neighborhood, talking. “Karin,” Ann Marie Murray says, “was very concerned about her future and where she would live. She mentioned Mike Zaccaro, but Mike was single then, so that was out. We said we would do whatever we could to provide her with a home, and if necessary, she could come and live with me and my husband. Karin wasn’t terribly worried about money, though; she told me that there was about three hundred thousand dollars in insurance.”

  Back at the Coleman house, lunch was ready, and after they had eaten, Karin, Zaccaro, Butler and Murray left to drive into Hartford to meet with Jeff Sands at his office, to try to make some order of the chaos, to begin to deal with Karin’s future. Shannon stayed behind to field phone calls.

  For about three hours that afternoon the adults—Sands, Zaccaro, Butler and Ann Marie Murray—and the teenager, Karin, gathered in the conference room at Wiggin & Dana. “Karin was very confused,” Sands says, “and she had a lot of questions, and we were there to help answer those questions.” It was decided then that Zaccaro would serve as executor and Sands as lawyer for the estate.

  There were the unpleasant but necessary topics. There were the funeral arrangements. Karin told them she had already spoken to Archbishop Whealon who had agreed to officiate. A funeral home had to be contacted, and the body had to be brought down from Springfield; Sands took care of those things.

  Where, Karin asked, was she going to live, and how was she going to pay for everything that had to be paid for? The obvious answer was her father.

  Sands called Michael Aparo. “I asked him whether he wanted to be the executor of the estate instead of Mike Zaccaro. He said he didn’t. I asked him what kind of arrangements he was going to make for Karin in the interim. He said, ‘I want to do everything I can for Karin. Isn’t it awful what happened?’ He was very supportive in that first phone conversation. Both Mike and I thought she ought to go and stay with him, though Karin wasn’t terribly keen on that idea. But after all, he was her father, and he had responsibilities. Then I got a second call from Michael Aparo, and he said, ‘She can’t come. Because, well, my wife …’ It was unbelievable. Her dad’s new wife didn’t want any part of her. I was dumbfounded by it.” Karin would stay with the Duboises for a while, but a more permanent place would have to be found. Karin did not me
ntion her own plan to live with Alex Markov or any other plan she might have had in mind.

  “She knew that Joyce had life insurance and a will,” Sands says, “but she didn’t seem to know how much insurance, and she was under the impression that they were in debt, but she seemed to have no idea how deeply in debt.” Karin did not repeat the figure for the insurance she’d offered Ann Marie Murray, and Murray did not bring it up.

  What Karin did know was that her mother kept her papers in an expandable file that was either in her closet or in a file cabinet in the basement of the condo. But no one was yet permitted to enter the premises, so, Sands says, “we were at a loss at this point.” Any decisions would have to wait until the police allowed them to go in and look through the papers. Sands called the police and asked when they could get into the condo, explaining why it was necessary to do so as soon as possible. He was told that they could go in the next day, that Charlie Revoir would meet them there. Revoir wanted to talk to Karin, anyway, wanted her to look around the condo and see if anything was missing, anything present that had not been there before, if anything was not as she remembered it.

  As the conference went on, Karin seemed, Sands thought, increasingly pale, distracted and in some shock, and at one point she broke down and began to cry. They gave her time to recover, which she did rather quickly, and then the discussions went on.

  Sometime after five it ended. Zaccaro led her down to his car and drove her back to Glastonbury, to the Duboises’ house, where she remained for the next three weeks.

  In South Glastonbury that afternoon Shannon Dubois, distraught over what she had been told by her best friend, answered phone calls at the Coleman house and waited, for news, for anything.

  At some point, she couldn’t remember when, Matt Coleman left, and she was alone. About three Dennis arrived home from work. Shannon went out onto the lawn to greet him, and they stood there for a few minutes, “talking about normal things. Then the phone rang, and I answered it. Dennis went upstairs. He was acting weird.”

  When she finished the call, she went upstairs after him. He was in his room. He looked at her and said, “Do you know what happened?”

  Shannon said, “Yes. Karin told me you killed her mother.”

  Dennis nodded and then told her how he had done it, told her the details that she had already heard earlier that day from Karin.

  About five Shannon went home. Karin arrived a little later and moved into Shannon’s room. Through the evening they tried to act as normally as they could, as normally as possible for two teenagers caught in the middle of a murder. But later that night, in Shannon’s room, Karin asked, “Did you talk to Dennis today?”

  “Yes, and he told me everything.” Slowly Shannon repeated the story Dennis had told her.

  “Oh,” Karin said, “that’s what he told me last night.”

  For a while they talked about what might happen. “There was,” Shannon says, “a kind of understanding that we weren’t going to say anything to anybody.” It was the kind of compact teenagers are forever making, an essential part of that eternal conflict between the generations. Usually, those secrets are of little interest to anybody else, so it matters little when they are held close. This, of course, was a secret of a different kind, a dangerous one with far-reaching consequences, not just for Shannon and Karin but for many others. Still, for Shannon at that moment and probably for Karin, too, there was something unreal about the whole thing. “I couldn’t believe it had really happened,” Shannon said later. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

  Then Karin went to the phone and called Dennis. “She was consoling him and telling him not to worry,” Shannon remembers.

  3

  Joyce Aparo had been dead for two days before Karin went home for the first time. A little after ten in the morning Friday, August 7, Susan Dubois dropped her off outside the condo, watched as Karin went up the walk, unlocked the door and went inside. Then she drove away. For fifteen or twenty minutes Karin was alone.

  About ten-thirty Jeff Sands arrived, and a few minutes later, Mike Zaccaro and Roland Butler showed up. Over the next half hour they roamed through the apartment and went down to the basement to search the file cabinet Joyce kept there, a cabinet containing mainly a mass of personal letters. It was a filing cabinet the police were never aware existed; they were not told of it, and they did not then or later ever investigate the basement. Back upstairs Karin led Sands, Zaccaro and Butler to a closet in Joyce’s bedroom and pointed to a small valise filled with papers—insurance policies, will, title for the condominium, mortgage papers and more. In a dresser drawer in that room, they came upon an American Express card and a number of bills, including an American Express bill that contained a notation about payments for American Express life insurance. Sands and Zaccaro took all those papers, sat on the bed and began to go through them. “Up to that moment,” Sands said, “we thought that what with the debts there wouldn’t be much of an estate.” Now they discovered that there was indeed an estate, and it was not small. There was a group insurance policy on Joyce’s life taken out by Athena and valued at about $50,000 and the American Express life insurance worth another $55,000, and both were increased by indemnity clauses in case of accidental death. Perhaps most important of all, among the papers they found a credit life insurance policy that paid off the mortgage on the condo, leaving the title free and clear. Mike Zaccaro did some figuring. Joyce Aparo’s estate, he estimated, was worth between $350,000 and $375,000, and even after deduction of the outstanding debts, which came to about $46,000, Karin, as the main beneficiary under the will would net something over $300,000. Sands and Zaccaro explained all this to Karin. “She seemed quite happy about it,” Sands says.

  At some point during all this paper work Karin walked out of her mother’s bedroom and into her own room. The doorbell rang. Sands went to answer it. Revoir and Beth Libby, a female officer, were outside. He let them in, and they all went into the living room. Karin came out of her room. In one hand she was holding two pieces of paper, folded twice. Revoir, who had not seen Karin before, asked her to take a tour of the apartment with him. They wandered about. Karin looked around. She said that her mother’s purse and wallet, with some cash and credit cards, were missing. In her own room she pointed to a pair of sunglasses on her desk and told Revoir she had never seen them before. Revoir put them in an evidence bag. She opened the drawer in her bedside table, Revoir standing by her. In the drawer were three diaries. “I asked him if he wanted them,” Karin says, “and he said no, he had already read them and he had no interest in them.”

  Back in the living room, Karin sat on the sofa, the folded papers still visible in her hand. Revoir sat on the sofa near her. Zaccaro and Butler sat nearby. Sands was in a chair directly across from her. Over the next hour or so Revoir and Libby questioned Karin about her mother’s background. “I was just kind of listening,” Sands says, “and I thought, Gee, they asked that question a couple of minutes ago. Karin hadn’t caught on to that, and the answers she was giving weren’t quite the same answers she gave the last time. Close, but not quite. All of a sudden, I’m thinking, Aha, this is an interrogation. Why would you ask the same question three different ways unless you wanted to see if there’s some kind of inconsistency in the answer? So I said to the officer, ‘Wait a second here. Look, is this any kind of interrogation? I want you to tell me right now, is Karin is a suspect?’

  “He said, ‘Well, no, she’s not.’

  “I said, ‘Fine. To the extent that your questions have to do with mundane matters like who had the key, who gave it to whom, things like that, I’ll let it go on. But I want to tell you, I’m not a criminal attorney, but if this thing gets out of hand, it’s going to stop there.’ It pretty much stopped then.”

  But Sands had noticed something that everyone else was overlooking. The papers in Karin’s hand. Revoir asked no questions about them, did not seem to be aware of them. Sands watched and waited. About halfway through the interview Revoir an
d Libby took a break, got up and walked out of the room. Karin unfolded the papers and read them. She refolded them, crumpled them in her hand, paused, got up, walked over to an open green Hefty garbage bag and threw them inside. Revoir and Libby were just returning to the room. Karin was in full view of everybody. Nobody commented. Mike Zaccaro noticed but, he says, “I didn’t think it was anything unusual.” Jeff Sands watched but said and did nothing. Nobody else seemed to pay any attention.

  The questioning resumed, went on for a little time more, and then Revoir and Libby left. As soon as they were out the door, Sands looked at Karin. “Karin,” he said, “I saw you take those pieces of paper and throw them away. If they have anything to do with your mother’s death, we have to talk about it.”

  Karin rose from the sofa and went to the garbage bag, reached in, retrieved the papers and handed them to Sands. He read the first page, looked up at her, then read the second page. “Who wrote this?” he asked.

  “Dennis,” she said.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Between the sheets of my bed,” she said.

  Sands reread the note. The first page said:

  To My Dreamgirl

  I will “do the deed.” I PROMISE YOU!!

  The second page read:

  Monday. 4:15 P.M.

  Karin,

  Hi dear. How was your trip? O.K. I hope. I missed you horribly. Come back soon. Listen, I’ve got a plan for this week. Almost all the details are set. We must seriously talk. It could work. I hate those pictures on your dresser. (Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be nosey.) Had a bizarre dream. Your mother was in it. If your mom goes to work tomorrow either call me at work, or I’ll pass by on my way home. I can’t wait to talk to you. Do you still love me? (I hope). I love you more than ever. Please don’t ever leave me. I see good times for us in the near future. We’ll have fun. Well, the Dud’s [the cat] been fed, we played for a while. Ring me tonight any time if you can. See you soon? Can’t wait. We’ll soon be havin’ a party, you and me. I promise. I’m so in love with you my dear. I will ask you to marry me someday—the right way. The most romantic and loving way I can. I PROMISE. See you soon.